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When Tightlaced Theatre
and Sporadic Music's co-production of Susanna Mulvihill's new play,
1933: Eine Nacht Im Kabarett, opens in Edinburgh's Summerhall complex
in a couple of weeks, it not only marks the opening of 2014's
home-grown theatre season. The show also points to a fertile
under-the-radar arts scene that exists in the capital via a network
of young companies working in venues outwith traditional theatre
spaces.
This has recently
manifested itself, both in the In Your Face Theatre company's recent
revival of the stage version of Irvine Welsh's novel, Trainspotting
at Out of the Blue's converted drill hall home, and in the Village
Pub Theatre's ongoing presentations of new work in the back room of
the bar the company have adopted as home. Previously, the Siege
Perilous company have produced work at the Malmaison Hotel on the
Shore, while Creative Electric have been devising experimental work
with young people in the bowels of the Bongo Club. T…

When novelist Alasdair
Gray suggested that we should 'Work as if you were in the early days
of a better nation' on the frontispiece of his 1983 short-story
collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, the landscape he imagined might
have looked and sounded a little like Scot:Lands. The New Year's Day
centrepiece of Edinburgh's Hogmanay programme, Scot:Lands presents a
microcosm of Scottish music and performance that both looks to its
cultural roots for inspiration while remaining utterly contemporary
as it is performed in the throbbing heart of the capital city.
With nine unnamed but
iconic venues in Edinburgh's Old Town hosting some imagined new
'Land', each features a rolling programme of international artists
curated by venues and figureheads from a particular area. So where
High:Land will be run by The Ceilidh House venue in Ullapool,
Heid:Land will be curated by The Pathhead Music Collective from Fife.
While the former will feature the likes of radical folk …

The Sexual Objects –
Feels With Me (Eyelids in the Rain)
Five stars
For seekers who know,
Davy Henderson is the greatest rock poet on the planet, and has been
ever since he exploded into Edinburgh's post-punk art/pop scene with
the short-lived but fast-burning Fire Engines. High-concept pop
entryism followed with Win before the guitar shards of The Nectarine
No.9 got things back to basics.
Henderson's latest
vehicle is an altogether warmer affair, and this first recorded
sighting since 2011 debut vinyl long-player, 'Cucumber', retains its
loose-knit appeal. A download-only parallel universe smash hit, it
opens with Simon Smeeton's acoustic guitar intro before ooh-oohing
its way into a gorgeous harmony-kissed instant classic that warns
against false prophets before bursting into raptures of its own
making.
There are shades here
of '22 Blue', an early lament by The Nectarines, which Henderson,
Smeeton, drummer Iain Holford and bass player Douglas McIntyre …

Out of the Blue,
Edinburgh
Four stars
It's like stepping into
a time-warp even before the young and tellingly named In Your Face
Theatre company's revival of Harry Gibson's stage version of Irvine
Welsh's seminal debut novel properly begins. The early 1990s techno
that plays prior to the show in a venue dark and expansive enough to
fool the audience into thinking they've stumbled on some dilapidated
warehouse in the middle of nowhere has something to do with it. So
too do the studiedly observed re-creations of the poster images from
Danny Boyle's 1996 film version on the programme of Christopher Rybak
and Craig Boyle's promenade production, which arrives just a few
months shy of the play's twentieth anniversary.
There, however,
similarities end, as Rybak and Boyle's chorus of glow-stick wielding
hoodied-up grim reapers lead us through a ghost train vision of Mark
Renton and his assorted drug buddies in what is essentially a series
of cut-up routin…

When Jimmy Chisholm was
asked to direct Aladdin, this year's top of the range pantomime at
the King's Theatre, Glasgow, it was a marriage made in back-stage
heaven. Chisholm, after all, is an actor who, over some forty years
experience, has done pretty much every Christmas show going. Not only
has he written and directed his own pantomimes in Stirling and, with
Ian Grieve, in Perth, but he has played dame on the stage of the
King's itself.
The King's is the big
one, after all, with great expectations from all involved. As such a
seasoned performer, Chisholm will understand only too well what his
starry cast have to deal with in their efforts to make Aladdin the
biggest and brightest show in town. It will have helped too that an
actors short-hand will already exist between him and the likes of TV
favourites Karen Dunbar, who plays the Genie of the Ring, Still
Game's Gavin Mitchell, as the evil Abanazar, and Widow Twankey
herself, played by Gordon Cooper.
Cooper'…

Naomi Wilkinson – Theatre designer
Born, August 16th 1963; died November 18th 2013
Naomi Wilkinson, who has been found dead at her home in Islington,
North London, was a singular stage designer with a vision and flair
that was a natural fit for large-scale shows, but which could also be
applied to smaller studio pieces. In the former, there were few bigger
than Dominic Hill's epic production of Peer Gynt, which began its life
at Dundee Rep during Hill's tenure there as co-artistic director. In
the latter, a box that was part kennel, part museum exhibit was enough
to bring atmosphere to an already chilling play such as Hattie Naylor's
play about a young boy living wild on the streets of Moscow, Ivan and
the Dogs, which toured to the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh.
Gifted with a strong visual aesthetic from an early age, Wilkinson
initially studied fine art in Bristol before being increasingly drawn
to stage design, going on to study it on the Motley Theatre Desig…

This time last year, the artistic team at the Traverse Theatre in
Edinburgh were preparing celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary
celebrations of Scotland's new writing hub. While a certain amount of
looking back over a colourful history since its beginnings in a former
High Street tenement brothel turned 1960s bohemian hub was necessary,
it was the future that concerned artistic director Orla O'Loughlin and
associate director Hamish Pirie the most.
With this in mind, the Traverse 50 was launched. This initiative
initially saw some 630 writers with no more than two professionally
produced plays under their belts respond to an open call for 500-word
micro-plays inspired by Edinburgh's capital city. From these, some
fifty writers were selected to take part in a year-long programme of
events. This was kicked off by Plays For Edinburgh, a performed reading
of all fifty selected plays by a professional cast that took place over
one long but exhilarating evening…

Citizens Theatre, Glasgow
Five stars
A dread-locked and camouflage-trousered boy wanders through the
auditorium and onto the stage at the opening of Nikolai Foster's epic
take on Stuart Paterson's dramatisation of Rudyard Kipling's novel.
When the boy takes off his headphones, stops checking his smart-phone,
sniffs the air and howls to the heavens, it sets the tone for a hip and
street-wise spectacle that's as far away from the Disneyfication of
Kipling's story as you can get.
The dread-locked boy is Mowgli, the original feral kid, who, stolen by
ruthless tiger Shere Khan, is rescued by wolves and shown the ways of
his new world by bear Baloo and panther Bagheera. Except here, Jack
Lord's ageing pack leader Akela wields an electric guitar, Lanre
Malaolu's Shere Khan is a blinged-up, fur-coated gangsta and Jorrell
Coiffic-Kamall's Bagheera a be-shaded body-popping rapper. Elexi
Walker's slinky Kaa the snake, meanwhile, brings to mind Bat…

Cumbernauld Theatre
Four stars
It's worth wrapping up warm for the fun-sized wintry adventure enticing
wand-waving young audiences to Cumbernauld this year. The wooly-hatted
and winter jumpered cast of five are already onstage to greet them at
the opening of director Ed Robson's new take on Hans Christian
Andsersen's beloved tale. As the cheery quintet set the scene of young
Gerda's quest to free her best friend Kai from the clutches of the
dreaded Queen, each peels off to become a multitude of larger than life
characters Gerda meets en route.
With Samantha Foley playing Gerda with wide-eyed gusto, one minute the
others are operating a puppet of Jerry The Ferry Frog as Gerda attempts
to cross the lake, the next they've become a pair of wax moustached
Welsh guards. Nicky Elliot becomes Gerda's faithful on the road
sidekick Dug the daft dog, Heather Pascal makes for an ethereal
Princess of Dreams, while Julie Brown doubles up as a Flower Lady who
pl…

Summerhall, Edinburgh,
December 7th-January 24th 2014
When Keith Waterhouse's
fictional fantasist Billy Liar wanted to escape from the horrors of
the real world, he would retreat to a place inside his head called
Ambrosia. The Situationists, meanwhile, charted psychogeographic maps
of European cities, navigating places by mood rather than geography.
There is much of the spirit of both in Jerry Gretzinger's
ever-expanding map of an imaginary world, which the American artist
has been painting for more than fifty years, and which currently
numbers some 3011 sheets of A4 paper.
“It goes way back to
my childhood,” 79-tar old Gretzinger explains on the eve of his
parallel universe's first appearance outside the U.S.A.. “I was
fascinated with maps, and would imagine these places, because we
didn't travel much. Then at some point I started making my own. That
grew out of playing with my brother on this little plot of land we
lived on. We created this little model village out …

Pitlochry Festival Theatre
Three stars
The programme for Pitlochry's latest festive outing may claim Thomas M.
Sharkey's stage adaptation of Frank Capra's seminal 1946 film inspired
by Philip Van Doren Stern's short story, The Greatest Gift of All, to
be 'A New Musical!', but the show is actually some twenty years old.
While there may be good reasons why it's taken so long for Sharkey's
take on things to receive its Scottish premiere, after last year's
success with White Christmas, it is nevertheless a bold move for
director John Durnin to programme something so rarely seen onstage,
however iconic its source.
Much of the story remains unchanged, as small-town everyman George
Bailey attempts to throw himself off a bridge before an angel called
Clarence steps in with what these days would be deemed an intervention.
The first half has Clarence watch over George as a celestial narrator
to see how he got to such a state, while in the second,…

Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Five stars
The stage adaptation of the Irving Berlin scored 1954 feelgood movie
has been on the circuit for almost a decade now. Going by this latest
outing for David Ives and Paul Blake's version, it hasn't lost any of
its sparkle. For anyone who's been stranded in a remote ski lodge, the
story revolves around successful showbiz duo Bob Wallace and Phil
Davis, who learnt their song and dance chops when in the army during
World War Two.
Womanising Phil cons straight-laced Bob into boarding a train to wintry
Vermont with singing sisters Betty and Judy Haynes. The hotel they're
staying at turns out to be run – badly - by Bob and Phil's much-loved
former General, who inspires his former charges to stage a benefit show
in his barn, while love between the two double acts blossoms out of
season.
It's a heart-warmingly sentimental romance that must have had a
significant resonance when first seen so soon after the war. Almos…

It's somehow fitting
that Rachel O'Riordan's swansong as artistic head of Perth Theatre is
Cinderella. Here, after all, is an age-old tale of how a young woman
went to the ball as a stranger before leaving all about her dazzled
before she disappears. So it has been with O'Riordan's three-year
tenure in Perth, which has seen the Cork-born director arrive in
Scotland as an unknown quantity and pretty much revitalise one of the
country's oldest producing houses with some bold programming and even
bolder results that have increased audiences, drawn critical praise
and won awards.
For her final
production, O'Riordan persuaded playwright Alan McHugh to re-jig his
original script so that the action now takes place in a theatre
rather than the stately home of his original. Coming on the eve of
the theatre going dark for two years as it commences a fourteen
million pound redevelopment, this is O'Riordan's way of saying
goodbye to the theatre she's calle…

When Daniel Padden went to the first read-through of David Harrower's
play, Ciara, he didn't think it required any music to accompany it.
Given that the Glasgow-based composer and musician had just been
commissioned to write a score for the play, this looked like it was
going to be a problem. As it turned out, while the play was led by
Blythe Duff's solo turn as a Glaswegian art gallery owner and daughter
of a recently deceased gangster, Padden framed the play with a
soundtrack that helped to accentuate the mood of the piece even more.
“Finding music to put into the play was a real challenge,” says Padden
of Harrower's Herald Angel winning Fringe hit, which returns to the
Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this week. “In physical terms, it's just
one woman onstage telling a story, with no action or set-pieces that
offer a composer the opportunity to do something, so just finding a
space for music was a challenge. In David Harrower's writing, every
word…

Royal Lyceum Theatre,
Edinburgh
Four stars
There are few better
symbols of the early twenty-first century's ongoing era of recession
and austerity culture than Charles Dickens' nineteenth century
meanie, Ebeneeza Scrooge. Neil Duffield's stage adaptation of
Dickens' novel is brought to life in Andrew Panton's production in a
way that emphasises the error of Scrooge's greedy ways without ever
losing sight of the story's power as family entertainment.
With the narrative
spread out between an eight-strong ensemble cast, who play assorted
musical instruments to accompany their singing of traditional carols,
Scrooge's Christmas Eve epiphany is conveyed in an impressionistic
fashion by a magnificently pop-eyed Christopher Fairbank. As he
humbugs his way through the streets, Fairbank's Scrooge resembles the
sort of mean-spirited and compassion-free politician who believe poor
people are penniless by choice, and that beggars are little more than
scroungers…

Dundee Rep
Four stars
A birthday party to beat them all is the result when a children's
entertainer fails to turn up in David Wood's stage adaptation of Roald
Dahl's classic story about a little girl called Sophie's unlikely
friendship with the Big Friendly Giant, who whisks her away from the
orphanage she lives in. By framing the story with another girl called
Sophie's party, as she and her pals hit the dressing up box to tell
Dahl's story, it takes an imaginative leap into a world of creative
play which the young audience can draw inspiration from in Joe Douglas'
bright and bold production. The appearance of Sophie and The BFG in
both human and puppet form lends proceedings an even more fantastical
essence.
Ali Craig's BFG is a wide-eyed vegetarian hippy type who collects
dreams before planting them in the minds of sleeping children. Isolated
from his flesh-eating contemporaries for simply being too nice, and
with a unique line in word-…

About Me

Coffee-Table Notes is the online archive of Neil Cooper. Neil is an arts writer and critic based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Neil currently writes for The Herald, Product, Scottish Art News, Bella Caledonia & The List. He has contributed chapters to The Suspect Culture Book (Oberon), Dear Green Sounds: Glasgow's Music Through Time and Buildings (Waverley) & Scotland 2021 (Eklesia), & co-edited a special Arts and Human Rights edition of the Journal of Arts & Communities (Intellect). Neil has written for A-N, The Quietus, Map. Line, The Wire, Plan B, The Arts Journal, The Times, The Independent, Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman, Sunday Herald, Scotland on Sunday, Sunday Times (Scotland), Scottish Daily Mail, Edinburgh Evening News, Is This Music? & Time Out Edinburgh Guide. He has written essays for Suspect Culture theatre company, Alt. Gallery, Newcastle, Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Berwick upon Tweed Film and Media Arts Festival & Ortonandon. Neil has appeared on radio and TV, has provided programme essays for John Good and Co, & has lectured in arts journalism at Napier University, Edinburgh.